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Arabic and missing short vowels | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | Arabic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| SRC Newbie United States Joined 5819 days ago 31 posts - 33 votes Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 18 13 December 2011 at 1:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Students/speakers of Arabic: This is from a very interesting and informative site on learning Arabic, found here: http://arabic.desert-sky.net/index.html It's a bit long, but please read this: "First, an explanation: in Arabic, only long vowels are written out. Short vowels are left out, except in the Qur'an, Bible, and children's books. Therefore, a beginning student would see كتب as k-t-b, and not know which vowels to insert between letters. This word could be "kataba" (he wrote), "kutiba" (it was written), or "kutub" (books). How do you know which one it is? Well, if you're an absolute beginner, you won't know all the possible pronunciations, and you simply won't know how to pronounce it without checking a dictionary or asking a native speaker. This is frustrating, but as you learn more vocabulary and grammar, things will get easier. Once you gain more knowledge of Arabic, you'll know that كتب could be a verb in the regular past tense (kataba) or the passive voice (kutiba), or a noun (kutub). Then you'll figure out the correct pronunciation from context. Learning the verb forms as soon as you can will also help with this. You'll know all the patterns for conjugating the different verb types and deriving certain words (like active/passive participles) from verbs. For example, you'll know that form 3 verbs are pronounced يُفاعِلُ in the present tense. Then when you see يغادر, you'll know the pronunciation without having to look it up. Still, when you see a form 1 verb you don't know, you will have to look it up in the dictionary to know the pronunciation of the present-tense conjugation. But basically, reading Arabic will get easier with time and knowledge." ====== As a prospective student of Arabic, after reading this, all I can think is: Can this **possibly** be true?? If written Arabic allows ambiguity between grammatical functions as different as regular past tense, passive tense, and nouns, then how incredibly long does it take to build up even the most rudimentary reading skills? Half-jokingly, does the student still struggle with reading a restaurant menu after 4 years of college-level study (assuming the menu is in MSA)? Even with Japanese, you begin to acquire some basic literacy after 3 years of study. By comparison, this explanation (which I'm not disputing at all) gives the impression that Arabic is in some sense a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle - you either get it all at once, or you are lost in an ocean of half-words. If all a newspaper hands you is k-t-b, then how does the student realistically cope with that? I'd love to know what people think, how true this is, and how they handled it in their own studies ... - SRC 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Stephen7878 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4620 days ago 34 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Greek, Italian | Message 2 of 18 13 December 2011 at 2:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It definitely is pretty daunting, but I agree with the article in that the more you learn and understand how the language works, the less you well need to rely on the vowels. In other words, with enough practice you will be able to tell exactly how to pronounce the word just from the context that its in.
Of course I'm only a couple months in and still heavily rely on the vowels to understand, but even now I'm already able to omit them on some of the more common vocabulary and greetings so hopefully in 4 years I wont have any trouble reading a menu.....hopefully. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5438 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 3 of 18 13 December 2011 at 2:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In my study of Hebrew I realized that you can indeed read without vowel points.
1) It is true, as the above-mentioned article states, that vowels are not wholly arbitrary; there is a structure which forms tend to have which vowels, especially in verb forms. 2) There are many strings of letters which are not unambiguous. For example: חכמה can be 1) A verb: [xaxəma] she was wise 2) A noun: [xoxma]: wisdom 3) An adjective: [xaxama]: wise (f.) But the general idea is clear (something about being wise), and in context you may stumble sometimes and have to reread the sentence, but as an experienced reader you know which form fits in the given context: The old woman there חכמה (that must be the verb!) The חכמה woman comes [that must be the adjective!) He possessed great חכמה (that must be the noun!) Or are you flabbergasted when you read in English: "Wait a minute, there is still a minute problem to solve!" The situation worsens when an abjad like arabic script is used for a language where the vowels are totally arbitrary like in Persian, but that is another theme. Edited by Cabaire on 13 December 2011 at 2:31am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Humdereel Octoglot Groupie United States Joined 4817 days ago 90 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written), Turkish, Persian, Urdu Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 18 13 December 2011 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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After reaching proficiency in Arabic, I agree with what the website (one of my favorites to recommend to students, BTW) states is rather correct. I have come across several words that were spelled the same but meant slightly different or even significantly different things.
However, I wouldn't freak out too much about it. As the author of that site and Stephen7878 stated, it's something you'll worry less about the more you practice and learn about Arabic. When I was just a few months into my studies of Arabic, I also freaked out when I learned of the omission of short vowels from most texts, but by the end of my second year, I felt less worried. My recommendation? Build your vocabulary. Arabic has a very expressive and voluminous vocabulary that it is exciting and engrossing. However, it can also become scary if you go too far into the grammar without having a good base in the vocabulary. By learning vocabulary, understanding the roots, and then seeing it context, that problem soon diminishes. I reached basic-intermediate proficiency in MSA in about 3-4 years, and then from then on I moved onto exploring the dialects. Arabic requires time and dedication, but it's not as impossible as it may sound originally. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| SRC Newbie United States Joined 5819 days ago 31 posts - 33 votes Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 5 of 18 13 December 2011 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
============ Very helpful reply, I appreciate it. I'm still a bit worried about the "Sh is (a) nce wmn and (a) gd frnd" issue, but I guess you have to just jump in. I'd be curious to know what texts you used for your MSA study -- 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5012 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 6 of 18 13 December 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When I first started learning Arabic, I found the missing short vowels extremely
irritating. But you've just gotta deal with it. The language isn't going to change for you. To be honest, I find the numerous arbitrary rules and the broken plural system to be even more frustrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5159 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 7 of 18 13 December 2011 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In case you're worried about the distinction between active and passive verb forms: - passive verbs are not as frequently used in written Arabic as in other languages - many passive verbs are used in mainly in fixed expressions It's true that it's sometimes possible to mistake a noun for a verb or vice versa, but usually you can tell from the context which one it is. For example if there's an article or a number before the word or an adjective after it, it's most likely a noun otherwise a verb. Also since Arabic sentences tend to start with a verb (it's a VSO language), you wouldn't, for example, assume that "k-t-b" at the beginning of a sentence is a noun.
Most students will be able to decipher standard menus after several weeks or months not years. In that respect Japanese is much more complicated.
It can be a bit of a puzzle at times, but it's definitely manageable. However, if you don't like solving puzzles, Arabic is not for you.
The newspaper doesn't simply hand you "k-t-b" it also hands you the words before and after it. BTW, ESL students face similar problems with English. Take for example the following two sentences: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." How are foreign students supposed to know that the second "flies" is not a verb? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Renaçido Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 4923 days ago 34 posts - 60 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Latin | Message 8 of 18 13 December 2011 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Some points that are worth making about this: To a good extent people know a language from speaking it, i.e. they know how to pronounce things but not how to write it. Children get exposed to MSA since very young, considering that to a good extent they do consider MSA to simply be a formal version of the speech they hear from parents and friends (their Arabic vernacular, that is), particularly media or when they hear people speaking formally (throwing MSA features into their speech). (The distinction between "MSA" vs. "vernacular" isn't always done by natives, in fact I've seen it ridiculed by actual Arabs more often than not. In English we treat the distinction with different noun entities: "Modern Standard Arabic" vs. "Vernacular/Colloquial Arabic". In Arabic, they just call them "the more eloquent one" (الفصحى al-fuS7ä) and "the popular/public one" (عامية ʕaammiiya/ʕaammiyya/ʕaammeyya/etc.), and are usually meant to be more of a gradient, you ask Arabs and they tell you that a word is just "more/less فصيح faSiiH (eloquent)". This isn't always the case though, and some do feel a distinction akin as suggested by the term "diglossia", but IMO this is the minority's opinion.) This is a significant help for children, if you speak or know how the stuff sounds already, you can deal with a lot more ambiguity being helped by various things. Knowing the word already. Consider the word "passive" in your post: has it ever annoyed you that it isn't clear how the "i" is pronounced? As a non-native speaker of English myself, I could imagine it being pronounced /aɪ/, /ɪ/ or /i/, but as a native speaker of English (or so I assume), you probably have never even realized, as pronouncing it /ˈpæsɪv/ is so deeply ingrained into your head. It's about the same in Arabic. "Context". When people say context they mean a significant variety of concepts. It could be that the word is part of an idiom along its nearby words. It could be that the animacy of a word gives enough clues, if you have a human and an object as arguments, it's more likely the human is the subject and the object is the object (yeah). In Arabic it's possible to write a sentence meaning either "the woman closed her eyes" or "her eyes closed the woman", but the meaning intended is obvious. It could be that the speaker doesn't even know the word beforehand, but derivational clues (changes to words giving a different but closely related meaning) and nearby words/ideas help them to guess the meaning. Let's say you come across "their obtuseness astonished me". You may have never seen "obtuseness" before, but you may be familiar with "obtuse" meaning "stupid/silly" (in old-fashioned writing, say). Since -ness gives it some abstract meaning, you could interpret it as "their stupidity/silliness astonished me". Similar things are seen with Arabic words. Pronunciations can also be guessed this way by thinking of similar words, say, if you see a word like mCCC (a miim letter followed by three consonants), it's likely to be pronounced maCCaC, it's pretty common pattern. You may have never come across the verb "to bemoan (sth)" in English, but wait, did you just pronounce correctly, /bɪˈmoʊn/, based on "bemused" and "to moan"? (As a non-native speaker, I could imagine the -i- could be /i/ too...) We also have to consider the particular nature of Arabic. Actual Arabs rarely seem to miss the case markers otherwise written with those little marks only (-a, -un, -in, -an sometimes, etc.). Partly because they aren't used to pronouncing them, using them, or even considering them. Same things could be said for most verbs and their relation to the subjunctive and jussive moods, a good part of their paradigm is spelled (and usually pronounced!) the same as the indicative one. And as some final remark, in case of ultimate necessary of making stuff clear, Arabs do use the vowel marks. Do you have a manual with an Arabic translation nearby? Look closely, you may see a few ضمة ḍamma (short /u/s) on top of the first consonant of some words. And yes, these have been added to disambiguate a passive verb from an active one. (...Wow! This post ended up being much longer than I had originally planned...) Edited by Renaçido on 13 December 2011 at 10:58pm 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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